1. Field
The present disclosure relates to communication networks. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for facilitating quality-of-service (QoS) zoning in a network.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of transactions, from real-time stock trades to retail sales, auction bids, and credit-card payments, are conducted online. Consequently, many enterprises rely on existing storage area networks (SANs), not only to perform conventional storage functions such as data backup, but also to carry out an increasing number of egalitarian network functions such as building large server farms.
Historically, conventional network appliances (e.g., data-center servers, disk arrays, backup tape drives) mainly use SAN to transfer large blocks of data. Therefore, the switches provide only basic patch-panel-like functions. In the past decade, however, drastic advances occurred in almost all the network layers, ranging from physical transmission media, computer hardware and architecture, to operating system (OS) and application software.
For example, a single-wavelength channel in an optical fiber can provide 10 Gbps of transmission capacity. With wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology, a single strand of fiber can provide 40, 80, or 160 Gbps aggregate capacity. Meanwhile, computer hardware is becoming progressively cheaper and faster. Expensive high-end servers can now be readily replaced by a farm of many smaller, cheaper, and equally fast computers. In addition, OS technologies, such as virtual machines, have unleashed the power of fast hardware and provide an unprecedentedly versatile computing environment.
As a result of these technological advances, a SAN switch fabric faces a much more heterogeneous, versatile, and dynamic environment. The limited network functions in a conventional switch fabric, such as a Fibre Channel (FC) fabric, can hardly meet these demands. For instance, a switch fabric may transport two data flows with different requirements on the same inter-switch link, where one flow is between two mission-critical applications and the other is for a simple data backup. These two flows have different quality of service (QoS) requirements, which are difficult to attain at the same time in conventional FC networks.